Key takeaways from Dot All 2023 in Barcelona

Myself, Andy and Jason recently visit the Dot All conference in Barcelona, and it was a bloody awesome trip. Paella, Sunshine, Alcohol and Craft CMS. What more could you want?

What did we learn at Dot All 2023 in Barcelona?

• There are some big changes coming to Craft CMS 5 whether we like it or not. Good job we like it! With a new "card" view that makes picking/choosing content a lot easier and a tonne of performance improvements when saving long form content.

• Craft CMS 5 is due to be released Q1 2024 and Inception fields are no longer a field (We were teased with this at Dot All 2022), but having a matrix in a matrix is! The new way of handling matrix content (Blocks will essentially be entries!) and building a matrix field is going to save developers and authors a lot of time that's for sure.

• Multistore is FINALLY coming to Craft Commerce along with catalog pricing that makes showing/sorting by sale prices a lot easier.

• We saw the worrying look on Joe’s (Director of Servd) face when he saw you could run Guzzle API requests directly in twig templating

• We picked some very handy little tricks for customising the Craft control panel using element actions, creating custom utilities, and creating front-end shortcuts to access the control panel lightning-fast.

• Accessibility, performance, and sustainability have never been more important in our industry and it really showed through a number of talks given. Especially how committed Craft CMS 5 is to a fully accessible Control Panel.

• Craft Cloud is (finally) here after being talked about for nearly 4 years and the direction pivoting multiple times. It looks really impressive and the P&T team has done an amazing job on it. We're going to try and get on the waiting list to give it a whirl. The only worry is the monthly cost for smaller businesses at around $260 per month.

• There was a great talk about reusing a component library that can span across a company with multiple sites, that exist in a private repo. Something we're currently working on internally so we got a few takeaways from that.

• It was great to see some large projects being featured and some helpful tips on how to best manage sites with lots of traffic and/or lots of data/entries, especially how to skip the queue feature in Craft CMS, and run scheduled CRON jobs to better handle tasks.

• This was the first year of "Lightning Talks" (15-minute talks) which we thoroughly enjoyed. But the main stand-out plugin that got a mention in a lot of talks was Sprig from Ben, this is a powerful plugin and is definitely getting some traction in the community.